


jukebox waltz

by undieshogun



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Wall Market (Compilation of FFVII)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:22:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24411262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/undieshogun/pseuds/undieshogun
Summary: Deep in the heart of Wall Market, Cloud learns from Aerith the virtues of dancing to the sway of one's own rhythm.
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough & Cloud Strife
Comments: 7
Kudos: 30





	jukebox waltz

**Author's Note:**

> final fantasy vii remake has got me by the balls and won't let go and that's all there is to it. 
> 
> find me on twitter @shiirasagi

Cloud leaned down—then stopped short on account of the hard pressure against his stomach.

From behind him, Aerith muffled a giggle against her hand.

“Need some help?”

Cloud scowled at the supply pod in front of him and took in a breath, diaphragm straining against the stiff fabric of his corset. “No,” he huffed out, and kicked the latch loose.

“The key is to bend your knees,” Aerith said, peeking over his shoulder to see what they’d uncovered as the lid sprung open with a hiss and a burst of steam.

“I’ll be sure to remember that,” Cloud muttered flatly, but he wasn’t above following the advice as he lowered himself to retrieve a vial of mega-potion. He tucked it into a small hidden pocket that contained some other emergency supplies he’d held onto after surrendering his weapons and armor to the staff at the Honeybee Inn.

“This’ll be great to have on hand! You’ve got a real knack for spotting these caches.”

“Shinra fills and installs them periodically for their guards and SOLDIERs, in case of emergency.” Cloud turned and led the way off the small, questionably ambiguous path they’d clambered through. The crinoline and pumps made squeezing between the grimy walls of the narrow alleys here far too difficult, but there were still other resources within reach.

“I guess that’s why you can find them pretty much anywhere! We were just told not to touch the one they put in our house—oh, careful now.” Aerith gripped Cloud’s arm to steady him as he lurched forward, his ankle twisting unpleasantly. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Cloud bit out, shaking off the momentary pain before gingerly planting his foot back on the ground. His toes were already starting to ache from the pressure. “This is ridiculous.”

Aerith’s expression fell in a rare display of glumness. “Do you really hate it that much?”

Cloud’s first instinct was to say yes, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to do so. He remained quiet and walked on in the direction of Corneo’s Mansion.

“Wait! Are we really doing this right now?”

“The sooner the better. Tifa’s waiting for us.”

“I know, but…” Aerith’s steps faltered and she put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s take a quick break. I need to mentally prepare myself first.”

Cloud glanced down the road—the mansion was already in view, set aglow by the hundreds of tiny, bright lights strung above and around it. He was ready in that moment to bring the whole place down to get Tifa back; but that wasn’t the plan.

“Fine. Just for a few minutes,” he relented.

Aerith tugged on Cloud’s sleeve and immediately began leading him away from the mansion. “I know a place that’s nice and quiet! Come on.”

Cloud’s toes were practically numb by the time they reached a small, fenced-off area squeezed in between two buildings on the other side of town, and he tried not to look too enthusiastic about flopping onto one of the two worn-looking benches.

The space was quiet, just out of the way enough to muffle the bustle and chatter of the Wall Market streets in the distance, and there were only a few other people here, mostly minding their own business. In the corner, a jukebox played a slow jazz song that a young man nearby swayed unsteadily on his feet to.

Aerith looked unbothered as she took a seat next to Cloud and smiled.

“Man, what a night!” she said with a huff, as if the worst was already over. She kicked off her heels unceremoniously and planted her bare feet on the ground, wiggling her toes playfully.

Cloud raised an eyebrow, but refrained from commenting. He wasn’t even sure what he would have said. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

At that, Aerith stared at him, her gaze searching. “Are _you_ ready to go?”

“Yeah…?” Cloud leaned away as Aerith drew near, her eyes glinting against the dull lighting of the lamp above their heads. Hers were a clean, crisp green, like the vast, verdant fields of wild grass that existed only in the lands outside of Midgar. He couldn’t tell if the image of them in his mind were true memories or simply from pictures he might have seen at some point.

She glanced down. “Why don’t you take yours off, too? I bet your feet could use a break.”

“Huh? ...Oh. I’m fine.”

“Aw, come on! It feels great letting them free!” Aerith kicked her feet in demonstration, flinging dust and tiny rocks about as she did.

Cloud had never met someone as carefree as Aerith, especially someone from the slums; even the children tended to be more serious. Still, there was something contagious about that whimsical smile of hers, like she knew everything was going to be all right even in situations where it clearly wasn’t. Cloud wasn’t sure if this was one of those situations, and something about that made it difficult for him to say no to her in the moment.

With a sigh, he kicked his pumps off—then sighed again, this time in relief as his toes sprung free of their pointed, ribbon-adorned prison. He rested his heels against the cool ground.

“See? Isn’t that nice?”

The jukebox clicked and whirled as the jazz track ended and an upbeat pop song faded in.

Cloud shrugged and held back a smile, staring absently down at ruffled lilac and white fabric. His wrists were crossed in his lap—his instinct was to cross his arms, but the dress was so tight around his chest and shoulders he feared it would tear if he did. As if that wasn’t enough, the corset continued to make taking any more than half-breaths impossible, and the crinoline dug into his legs as he sat.

He frowned and rubbed the corner of his eye—carefully, so as not to smudge his makeup. What little comfort he’d had in the moment was gone now with the reminder that everything else still pretty much sucked.

Of course, Aerith picked up on that immediately.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked softly.

Cloud was silent as he mentally sifted through a number of possible replies, ranging from “Nothing,” to more thoughts than he could vocalize in a reasonable amount of time. Before he could choose one, however, the sound of approaching footsteps made him look up.

“Evenin’, ladies,” slurred the young man who’d been standing near the jukebox earlier. Up close, it was clear that he was rather handsome, but the effect of his strong jawline and well-styled hair were diminished by the greedy look in his eye. Individuals like this were a dime a dozen in Wall Market.

Cloud’s lip curled. “Move along,” he said in a low voice.

“Aw, why so—“ The man hiccuped, then belched loudly, his glassy gaze roving over Cloud and Aerith’s figures in turn. “Just wanted to say hi.“

Cloud turned away and grimaced as the stench of stale alcohol wafted over him. “Listen, jackass—”

Aerith sprang to her feet and, within the second, was nose-to-nose with the man. “Move along,” she said firmly, teeth bared in a fierce, almost feral-looking snarl.

The drunkard’s eyes widened and, startled into a moment of lucidity, he stumbled away without another word.

Cloud watched him go with eyebrows raised. “Aerith,” was all he could say, jaw slack.

Aerith sat back down with a sunny grin. “I hate to be rude, but we were sort of in the middle of something, so…”

“Right.” Distantly, Cloud thought he ought to be grateful that she was on his side.

A beat passed, and Aerith’s smile faded. “You know, I can do this by myself.”

“No,” Cloud said immediately. “I’m going in with you.”

The pop song faded out, and the warm pull of long, slow violin notes filled the air.

Quietly, Aerith put her hand over Cloud’s, which made him realize he had it fisted tightly in his dress, the cloth coming away wrinkled as he released his grip. He pressed it down in an attempt to smooth it out.

“It’s not that,” he muttered, and looked away when Aerith gave him a curious look. “I mean, I don’t care that—if this is what we have to do to get Tifa back, then I’m fine with it.”

“So, what’s wrong?”

Cloud hesitated, reaching a hand up to rub the back of his neck. He paused at the feeling of warm skin against his palm; he had his gloves on more often than not, and sometimes even forgot what things felt like against his skin. Cloud stared at his hand, then closed it into a loose fist, the pale pink polish on his nails glinting with the movement. He frowned.

“I don’t understand why she did it,” he said quietly. “Why she would just give herself up like that. There must have been another way.”

“…You mean Tifa?”

Cloud nodded, still staring at his hand.

“Well, I don’t know her very well—“

“Or at all, you mean—“

“—but there are some things that everyone down here has in common. We look out for each other, you know.” Aerith looked up, her gaze distant as if she was looking beyond the plate and at the night sky itself. When she turned back to Cloud, there was a warmth in her expression that seemed almost painfully familiar to him in a way that he couldn’t place. “I’m sure Tifa did what she did to protect everyone in Sector 7.”

Cloud stared at Aerith. In the short time they’d been together, he’d come to realize that there were moments when he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her, like something in his subconscious compelled him to search the contours of her face for the answer to an unknown question, though it made him so inexplicably sad the longer he searched.

“Hey, um…Andrea said something to you, right? While you were onstage with him?” Aerith asked, pulling Cloud out of his thoughts.

He looked away, then hummed affirmative.

“Can I ask what it was?”

“…’Don’t ever be afraid.’”

“I wonder what he could have meant by that,” Aerith mused, her expression pensive.

Cloud shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. Another automatic response. It was so much easier, it seemed, to feign ignorance or disinterest than to have to face the possibility that there were people who actually understood him, or thought they did.

“ _Are_ you afraid?”

Cloud’s eyes widened, the question catching him off-guard. “Doesn’t change what we’d have to do either way,” he quipped, hoping it was enough to mask the shock. Aerith seemed to have a knack for asking stunningly direct questions with no concern for the implications of the answers.

“Well, I am.” Aerith blew out a breath of air, like she’d just gotten something immensely heavy off her chest, despite the whimsy in her voice. “I mean, here we are in the heart of Wall Market, without our weapons, about to walk right into Don Corneo’s Mansion like it’s no big deal. Just saying it makes my heart race, you know?”

Cloud shrugged for lack of a better response.

The jukebox clicked again, then made a strange, stilted hiccuping sound and went quiet.

In the midst of the sudden deafening silence, Aerith ran her hand over the plush red fabric of her dress. “I really appreciate everything Madame M and the others did for us; there’s no way we would have gotten this far without them. But something about being in these clothes in such an unfamiliar place makes me feel…”

“Naked,” Cloud murmured. He glanced up, and Aerith smiled.

“Yeah, I think so,” she said. “Like, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with myself, how I ought to carry myself, and it makes me feel exposed.”

“You don’t know how to be someone different than who you’ve always been.”

“Exactly…but then again, I also get the feeling that this could be a good thing, too. Maybe when you’re a different person, you get to escape from the things that hurt you—old struggles and burdens, if only for a little while.”

Cloud resisted the urge to look over his shoulder for the umpteenth time that night. For the past hour, he’d been unable to keep his mind off the lack of weight on his back, or the way cold night air bit against his exposed skin every time he moved.

But Aerith had a point. His weapon was a source of security, but it was also a commitment to a certain responsibility—one that he felt in every battle from the moment he gripped the handle to the final swing of the blade—and that was something he wouldn’t have to deal with tonight for however long he planned on staying in this getup.

Cloud swayed on a line between the clarity of understanding and the dense fog of uncertainty. He’d been here before. Something always stopped him from tipping one way or the other, and tonight would likely be no different.

For a while, Aerith simply watched him contemplate in silence. Then, she burst into giggles.

Cloud scowled. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I’m not laughing at you!” Aerith reassured him as she brought herself back down. “I’m just glad we finally found something in common. I was starting to think we’d never see eye to eye.”

“Somehow I doubt that would have discouraged you in any way.”

“Hm, good point. Looks like you already know me pretty well, huh?”

“Just a lucky guess.” Cloud couldn’t help the small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and something about the way Aerith’s eyes brightened made his chest ache with that same mysterious pain he’d learned to push aside every time it surfaced.

“By the way, I wanted to tell you…despite everything, seeing you up on that stage was really great. You looked right at home up there.” The mischievous twinkle in her eyes returned. “You never told me you were a dancer!”

Cloud felt his cheeks grow warm as he remembered the heat of the lights bearing down on him, the hard thumping of the bass reverberating through his chest as he moved across the stage beside Andrea. It had all passed like a blur, his heart pounding so hard he could barely hear anything above the rush of his own blood in his ears. “I’m not. I was just following along.”

There was a sort of gentleness in everything Aerith did, from the way she brushed her bangs out of her face to the absent tapping of her finger against her leg. Cloud traced her movements as she laced her fingers together as if to still herself and, not for the first time, somewhat regretted crashing into her life (literally) the way he had.

“How’s your nose doing, by the way?”

Cloud blinked. “What?”

“You know.” Aerith tapped the bridge of her own nose. “Rude got you pretty good this afternoon, huh?”

If by “pretty good,” Aerith was referring to the instance during their scuffle in which Rude had smashed his knee into Cloud’s face and broken his nose instantly before proceeding to fling him around like a sack of flour…then yes, Rude had gotten him pretty good that afternoon.

_Nothing personal_ his ass.

“I’m fine,” Cloud said, but remained still as Aerith leaned forward for an inspection.

“The bruising was still pretty bad a couple hours ago. You looked like a raccoon, hah!”

“Thanks.”

“But the folks at Honeybee did a really great job on you. I don’t think anyone will notice a thing.”

“Guess that’s the point.” If it helped him to get that much closer to reaching Tifa, then he supposed it was worth hardly being able to twitch his cheek without feeling like he might crack the layers of powders and creams caked below his eyes to conceal the black and blue.

Cloud glanced over towards the jukebox. It remained silent, but the lights continued flashing, casting a neon glow over the floor and walls around it. Perhaps it had simply completed its playlist rotation.

“We’re running out of time. Let’s go.” He brushed the dirt off his feet and slid them back into his pumps, his toes once again protesting against the pressure.

Aerith, however, made her way over to the jukebox.

“Hey—“

“One more song.”

“Aerith, Tifa’s waiting for us.”

“She’ll be all right. Corneo can’t do anything until we get there anyway, right?” Aerith punched a number in on the jukebox, then held out a hand as a slow orchestral ballad drifted out from the speakers. “How about a dance?”

Cloud pursed his lips, then regretted it slightly when he tasted the wax of lipstick. With a sigh, he took Aerith’s hand and figured he ought to just assume from now on that he would never be able to say no to her.

Aerith pulled Cloud’s hand up to her shoulder, then placed her own around his waist.

Cloud frowned. “Is this—?”

“It’ll be easier if I lead,” Aerith said with a wink, and began turning in time to the music in what resembled an attempt at a waltz.

Their movements were sloppy and uncoordinated, heels twisting and wobbling on the trash-littered concrete, but the tighter they held onto each other for balance the lighter Cloud started to feel, until their stumbling turned into gliding, and the music became background noise as they moved to their own shared rhythm.

“What’s she like?”

Cloud looked up at the sound of Aerith’s voice floating through the silence between them, like water trickling through the hole of a dam, slipping through the wall without breaking it. _I feel like I know you_ , Cloud suddenly felt the urge to say. Another voice in the back of his head, one he knew but didn’t recognize as his own, cried, _I miss you_.

“What?” was all he said in the end.

“Tifa, I mean. You guys have known each other a long time, right?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Cloud gathered himself, trying to think above the voices clamoring louder and louder in his head. “She’s nice—um. She’s kind. A good person.”

Aerith chuckled. “Obviously, otherwise you wouldn’t be working so hard to help her! But what’s she _like?_ ”

“Uh…” He wracked his brain for the right words to vocalize what he knew implicitly about Tifa: images of Nibelheim, the white light of the sun and the clean sparkle of the stars against the canvas of the night sky; the dinky counter at Seventh Heaven, shelves lined with cheap, shitty alcohol and a single yellow flower placed and nurtured with all the care in the world in a small vase.

“Cloud?”

Under the pressure of the stream, the hole in the dam split into a crack. Dust fluttered into the air, and the rush of the water began to drown out all else.

“She’s sensitive,” Cloud blurted. “But in a good way. She cares about people, and—she falls in love easily because of it.”

Aerith’s expression lifted into one of deep curiosity. “Really, now?”

“Y-yeah. She’s been like that since we were kids.”

“Gosh, you think she’d fall for me if I swept her off her feet tonight?” Aerith gasped, a blush rising in her cheeks. “I’m a lot tougher than I look, you know.”

“So is she,” Cloud replied, thinking of strong hands and stronger eyes. He met Aerith’s gaze and saw a simple, sincere joy. “Yeah, she’d like you.”

“And what about you? SOLDIER boy ever fall in love?”

Cloud stepped back abruptly, breaking the rhythm of the waltz. He pulled away and let his hands fall to his sides, palms brushing against the silk ruffles of his skirt. “My way of life doesn’t really afford me those kinds of things.”

Aerith looked unperturbed, folding her hands behind her back and swaying lightly to the music still playing from the jukebox. Her expression was warm, but there was a sort of sadness in the way she smiled at the ground. “Everyone deserves to know love, Cloud.”

Cloud’s next breath came in short, like someone had suddenly yanked the laces on his corset, and with the shattering of the dam he found himself being thrown back down to reality amongst the deluge, until he was once again standing in a tiny, trashed alley in the sleaziest, most dangerous town in the slums.

He closed his eyes, ignoring the heat gathering at the back of his neck, and turned away. “Let’s just go.”

“Cloud.” Aerith grasped his wrist, stopping him with an impossibly strong grip. “There’s nothing in this world that isn’t worth cherishing. Promise me you’ll remember that.”

Cloud expected pain—the deep, longing ache that always manifested in his chest whenever Aerith spoke in that strong, even tone, like she was trying to impress her words into his very soul. But this time, all he felt was an odd sort of weight, dense but not entirely unpleasant.

He opened his mouth, then hesitated, feeling his throat close up. Aerith’s hand was warm around his arm, and he could feel her eyes on him. He didn’t have the courage to look back.

“I’ll try,” he managed, voice weak.

Aerith let out a huff and released him. “Good enough, for now,” she said, the amusement evident in her voice. She stepped forward and hooked her arm into Cloud’s. “Come on, then! We’ve got a damsel in distress to rescue!”

“She’s not really—“ Cloud scrambled to keep up as Aerith tugged him back onto the streets of Wall Market, the lights above blinding in their brilliance after so much time spent beneath the single, stuttering lamp in the alley.

As they navigated their way towards the massive mansion in the distance, sidestepping crowds gathered in front of food stands and dodging seedy looks, Cloud didn’t pull away until they found themselves standing before the red and gold-gilded double doors.

Aerith braced her hand on one side and turned to him, brows knitted in determination. “Let’s not be afraid.”

Cloud mirrored her on the other side, not protesting when her fingers brushed briefly, reassuringly, against the back of his hand as they fell away from each other. The magnificently painted wood was rough and chipped against his skin.

Behind him, the noise of the city seemed to fade, and the warm, staticky music of the jukebox in the alley took over, notes garbled and off-beat but strangely comforting all the same. He took in a deep breath of cold air, feeling his lungs fill properly for the first time in hours.

“On three.”

**Author's Note:**

> i just think cloud strife should be allowed to love, whether it's platonic or romantic.


End file.
